CHAPTER 1. The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Towards an Aural Hygiene, 1856-1907
Samuel Llano
CHAPTER 2. Sacred, Sublime, and Supernatural: Religion and the Spanish Capital in Nineteenth-Century Fantastic Narratives
Wan Sonya Tang
CHAPTER 3. The Modern Usurer Consecrates the City: Circulation and Displacements in the Torquemada Series
Sara Muñoz-Muriana
CHAPTER 4. Spirituality and Publicity in Barcelona, 1929: Performing Citizenship between Tradition and Avant-Garde
Alberto Medina
CHAPTER 5. The Places of the Subject: Abjection and the Transcendent City in Nada and La plaça del Diamant
Sarah Thomas
CHAPTER 6. Living Off the Exception: Biopolitical Modernity and Sacratio in Francoist Spain
William Viestenz
CHAPTER 7. Urban Avatars of “El Maligno”: Sacredness in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Caníbal
Antonio Cordoba
CHAPTER 8. Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes’s Crematorio
Daniel García-Donoso
CHAPTER 9. A New Heaven for a New Earth: Religion in the Contemporary Spanish Novel
Nathan Richardson
CHAPTER 10. Media Landscapes of a Well-Dressed Multitude: The City and the Individual in Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras
Esteve Sanz and Tatiana Alekseeva
AFTERWORD. The Temple and the City: Contaminations of the Sacred in Modernista Barcelona
Joan Ramon Resinaiv>
Antonio Cordoba is Assistant Professor at Manhattan College, USA. His research focuses on the interaction between modernity, wonder, and the sacred in Latin American culture.
Daniel García-Donoso is Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, USA. His work explores the relationship between religion and culture in modern and contemporary Spain.
This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.